Online to offline and back again

A lot of good things come from the state of Texas — food, culture, Beyonce, and especially our Fellows repping Texas. 

I got to talk to a Fellow and organizer from Texas Freedom Network about their work and their communities. The stories they told are worthy of your time so I’ll keep this preamble short. What I do want to point out is how these organizers have used Fellowship concepts and have found success. It’s an incredible thing to hear, not just because I work for Kairos, but because knowing that there are organizers out there winning with digital organizing is so exciting for the future of our movements. This story from Texas Freedom Network is a perfect example of why Kairos’ Organizing Team does the work they do.

Take a read through below for the full story.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Jelani: Can you introduce yourself with your name, your pronouns, and then what work you do with Texas Freedom Network? 

Jasmine: My name is Jasmine. I use she/they pronouns and I am the Texas Rising Regional Program Manager for the South Houston and Nacogdoches region. Texas Rising is our youth civic engagement branch of Texas Freedom Network, and I oversee that programming in South Houston and Nacogdoches. 

Liz: My name is Liz. I use she/her pronouns and I serve as the Texas Rising Statewide Program Manager for the Northern Region. I oversee Regional Program Managers and Coordinators, like Jasmine, as they do work in the different areas in Texas. One particular campaign that I have been working on is focused on centering our Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) campuses to ensure that we are accounting for Black voices.

Jelani: Who are the communities that you're fighting for, that you're working in? What issues are you fighting for?

Jasmine: Our communities are predominantly young diverse Texans. So Black, brown, LGBTQ — just representative of all of the great diversity that Texas has to offer. And what issues are we fighting for? I always like to say what issues aren't we fighting for. Unfortunately, here in Texas, we're taking hits from all around and we have to fight for a wide variety of issues. 

Civic engagement is a top priority, which we do through voter registration and voter education on college campuses, but also in our communities. You can see us at a lot of community events like Pride Festival or like Soul Food Festival in Houston.

Texas Rising works with students on university and college campuses to build power in their communities and on their campuses. A good example of this is at the University of Houston, where, [through] Texas state laws, cut all diversity and equity programs. One of the things that we lost was our Cougar Ally training, which we use to increase awareness of LGBTQ communities and how we can stand with and advocate for our LGBTQ communities. 

Texas Rising stepped in to help students on campus recreate that ally training and bridge that gap that state lawmakers caused. The cuts can be particularly harmful to historically marginalized communities on campus and young Texans in general.

Another example is at Texas Southern University. Students in that community are very interested in civic engagement and reproductive justice. So every year, we host a reproductive justice panel for the students.

This year we also hosted an LGBTQ mixer there, which was really just to raise awareness and build community in the HBCU space at Texas Southern University. And that was one of our best events of the year. We can get into how Kairos helped get us there later, but we had really great turnout and really great engagement from the students on campus.

How does Texas Rising plug into our community? By showing up at commissioner's courts and testifying for immigrant communities, showing up at city council meetings, meeting with our elected officials, meeting with our county clerks and building connections with our elections department.

So that pretty much sums up the work that I do, but that doesn't even get into the totality of Texas Rising as a program. Because at the statewide level, we're also focusing on things like fighting issues at the state board of education, which is a lot of textbook censorship and just really awful things.

Liz: We have six key issue areas as a program, which are immigration, climate justice, criminal justice reform, voting rights, reproductive justice, and then LGBTQI+ equality.

So whenever I am asked which communities we are representing or advocating for, I usually think of those issue areas because we're advocating for those who are marginalized and being affected by these issues. It’s a range of people from women to Black and brown folks to those within the LGBTQI community, etc.

We take a two-pronged approach where it comes to local advocacy. We engage in different campaigns like getting polling locations on campuses like Texas Southern University and University of Houston, and keeping certain institutions, for lack of a better word, from harming certain communities like ICE in Houston.

Aside from advocacy, we also have this throughline of engagement where we're telling young folks: we know you care about these issues. One person may be more passionate about criminal justice reform, because they have their own personal story with it, or somebody may be affected by a lack of reproductive autonomy that we have. But the throughline for all these issue areas is always going to be voting.

In order to get your voice heard and affect change within your local area, we push folks to understand that voting is one way you're able to share your voice, your opinion on these issues, and advocate for the change you want to see.

Jelani: Part of what I’m hearing is that y'all see what's happening in the state and you see what the need is. And then you are matching that with your members, your base, your students, and your young people who are interested in organizing. I think it's so smart. How has the fellowship impacted your work? How have you been able to apply what you've learned in the fellowship so far to what you have been doing?

Liz: Thinking about this fellowship, it's going to be very instrumental to us being able to enhance our organizational skills and digital advocacy techniques. Because technology is a really important part of all aspects of life. I'm interested to see how we're going to integrate it into organizing communities and also again, mobilizing folks to go out and vote.

Jasmine: Before joining the Kairos Fellowship, Liz and I had had conversations about where we're seeing gaps in our digital and data strategy, not just as Texas Rising, but as Texas Freedom Network as a whole. One of my personal goals was to take what I learned in Kairos to help me with recruitment for our Nacogdoches region. Being out there and organizing in rural space is very different from organizing in Houston. 

One thing that I'm really excited to start is helping our Texas Rising members use Kairos’ “one-two punch” strategy, where we're engaging with them offline and we're engaging them through our social media. 

Before Kairos, I would do our outreach through mass emailing and listservs. My team and I were always trying to keep these emails concise and keep them informative, but the Fellowship session on writing campaign emails has really helped us with our outreach. I mentioned the LGBTQ mixer that we had at Texas Southern University. That was one of our biggest and most well-attended events in the past like two years. To recruit for that event, we incorporated the “one-two punch” with people and we used the email structure we learned from Kairos.

After the event happened, we made sure to post a recap on social media, where we tagged people and connected with people by encouraging them to like the post and share it with their friends. We just had such great engagement overall for that event. Kairos really helped me come up with a system for when we're doing outreach and coordinating events and eventually make those relationships [with students] grow our program even more.

It was a lot of work but I'm very excited by the success I’ve seen so far. I’m going to implement that with other events in the future.

Jelani: Thank you for sharing that and it's so good to hear that the things are landing, that you're able to use it.

Jasmine: I just thought of another example.

Jelani: Go for it.

Jasmine: I wanted to share: Going back to Nacogdoches and rural organizing — one of the things that we did that I also grabbed from Kairos was power mapping, and how to use fandoms for targeted outreach. I did a power map of the Nacogdoches region, figuring out who our people are and where our people are. We just did that recently so we'll have to see in the fall what results that yields, but I am very grateful for that session.

Jelani: Okay my last question for y'all is fill in the blank: the internet is good for _____.

Liz: The internet is good for amplifying the voices and stories of marginalized people and groups. And for mobilizing those who are affected or moved to create social change.

Jasmine: The internet is good for spreading knowledge and for connecting across the world.

Statewide organizing really requires building strong relationships with so many different people across a huge space. That’s where digital organizing comes in because, when done strategically, it makes organizing across time and space and at scale possible for even small teams. And I think Texas Freedom Network is proving that it’s possible to connect with communities online and organize with them towards a shared goal.